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Year-end is coming all too soon, and that means many producers are staring unmet sales goals in the face. Here are three more insurance marketing helps for October to help you increase your sales.

Growing your business with online forms

Yes, we know Millennials prefer to shop online. So do the rest of us who aren't Millennials. That makes it crucial for your website to include optimized forms that are as easy and user-friendly as possible. Remember your brand messaging we talked about last month? If fast service is one of your key takeaways, then you need to be fast online.

Quoted in a PropertyCasualty360 article, Jim Kaiser, vice president of DataMentors, explained that these optimized forms must be easy-to use, and in order for that to happen, a real-time service is needed to verify and even correct data as its entered; otherwise the process can easily stall. He goes on to say,

A verification process can correct information provided through web forms, customer relationship management software or order-entry systems. If the wrong email address or phone when a lead is received, real-time verification software will correct the information before it is entered into a database for follow-up. Or with only a phone number, e-mail address or address, real-time services can be used on forms to identify if the contact is a current customer or a prospect.

He went on to explain that many of these forms will instantly populate the information for you, based on prior lead history, so that returning prospects or clients don't have to fill out all the forms again to get to their quote.

If you've spent the money optimizing your website so that you're found on page one for specific search terms, you absolutely need to consider using a real-time service to help you instantly verify and correct data. Otherwise, you're wasting money by losing all the leads who are insurance-shopping and checking you out.

Are you guilty of these worst 5 LinkedIn sins?

Without a doubt, LinkedIn is the most important social media site for salespeople, so the second of our three insurance marketing helps is for you to check your profile right now to make sure you’re looking your best! Don’t be guilty of:

1. Not providing any way for someone to contact you. You need to do a couple of things here: a) ensure that your primary email is set up to receive your notifications. You can do that here, once you’re logged into your account. b) Include your email address right in your profile, along with a Twitter link if you’re active on Twitter.

2. Having a boring profile. Here are a few dos and don’ts to help: DON’T make your profile the same as what’s on your resume. It shouldn’t be that formal. DO include keywords that are appropriate for what you do. DON’T overdo the self-promotion. You’re not a rock star or a ninja (so please don’t use those terms). DON’T focus on how many months straight you’ve broken your quota. DO describe how you’ve helped various customers achieve their goals and helped them be the hero. Why? Your audience is future customers – so make it easy for them to see how you can help them be the hero, too.

3. Having no photo – or a bad one. Profiles with photos are “11x more likely to be viewed,” says marketing guru Hubspot. While professional headshots are best, they’re not an absolute. Get a friend or coworker to take a few shots with your head slightly at an angle. Smile is optional, but no cheesy poses. And no pets, significant others or drinks in hand.

4. Not personalizing your connection requests. In a recent Hubspot survey, 64 percent of buyers and consumers said they regard a generic LinkedIn request from a salesperson as “creepy.” Address them by their first name, mention how you know them and what you have in common, ask to join their network, and sign your name.

5. Trying to sell them right away. You haven’t earned the right to pitch your product yet. Leave out the hard sales in your initial conversation.

4 Stats you need before you write that next marketing email

Spray and pray. It’s how most companies seem to run their email campaigns: let’s send it to every email address we have – hitting everybody – and hope that some of them will read and buy. What you don’t know is that this ploy can hurt you big time: it increases your unsubscribes, spam complaints and “graymail” – all those unopened emails that sit there and are finally deleted without being opened. As your emails create more of these three, the more red flags you’re raising with the various ISPs (internet service providers). Sooner or later, they’ll stop delivering your emails – and you won’t even know it.

So our last of our insurance marketing helps for the month is to rethink your emails with these five stats from Emma:

80 percent of readers only scan email. They don’t read every word. So keep it short and with one major point.

iPhones cut off the subject line at 32 characters. So put your most important words up front. Make your point concisely. Tease them to open your email.

Personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14 percent. Don’t just use their first name – add their company name within the paragraph. Most email marketing providers such as MailChimp or ConstantContact have this feature, so use it. However, with your subject line limit of 32 characters, you probably don’t want to use their first name in the subject line.

58 percent of adults check email first thing in the morning. You may want to try scheduling earlier send times – see if that increases your open rates.